LSU Sent Seven To The 2026 Draft. The Headline Was Who Fell, Not Who Rose.

LSU put seven players into the 2026 NFL Draft, and for a program that has spent two decades as one of the sport's premier talent factories, seven is a modest number. The cornerback Mansoor Delane carried the front end: the Kansas City Chiefs took him sixth overall on April 23, making him the 54th first-round pick in LSU history and the SEC's highest-drafted player for the third year running. But the class will be remembered for the player who went 243 picks later than Delane, not for Delane himself.

That player is Garrett Nussmeier, and his fall is one of the steepest in recent memory for a quarterback who once sat atop mock drafts. A year before the draft, Nussmeier appeared near the top of practically every projection and entered the 2025 season with first-round, even No. 1-overall expectations. He left it as the 249th pick of the seventh round, selected by the same Chiefs who had already taken Delane. The slide was not a mystery. An injury-plagued senior season sent his numbers tumbling from his 2024 form, and his draft stock fell with them.

Delane's selection extended a streak that defines the modern LSU brand. He followed offensive tackle Will Campbell, whom the New England Patriots took fifth overall in 2025, and quarterback Jayden Daniels, the No. 2 pick by Washington in 2024. Three straight drafts, three straight LSU first-rounders, and three straight years in which a Tiger was the first SEC player off the board. That is a recruiting-and-development consistency that survived a coaching upheaval most programs would not have weathered as cleanly.

The coaching upheaval is the unavoidable backdrop. Brian Kelly, who arrived from Notre Dame to win national titles in Baton Rouge, was fired during the 2025 season after a 5-3 start that included a 2-3 mark in SEC play. The Tigers limped to a 7-6 finish under interim leadership. A seven-player draft class is partly a snapshot of a roster in transition — talented at the top, thinner in the middle than LSU's standard, and shaped by a midseason firing that scrambled the program's trajectory.

The middle and back of the class tell the depth story. Safety A.J. Haulcy went in the third round to the Indianapolis Colts, and wide receiver Zavion Thomas followed in the third to the Chicago Bears. The sixth round produced three Tigers in a span of thirty picks: tight end Bauer Sharp to Tampa Bay at No. 185, wide receiver Barion Brown to New Orleans at No. 190, and linebacker Harold Perkins Jr. to Atlanta at No. 215. Then Nussmeier in the seventh. No second-round pick anywhere in the class — a gap that, for a program accustomed to stacking Day 2, is its own quiet indictment.

Harold Perkins' slide deserves its own footnote. He arrived at LSU as a five-star hybrid linebacker hyped as a future top-ten pick, the kind of edge-and-off-ball chess piece NFL defenses covet. A torn ACL in 2024 and an uneven role in a changing defense pushed him to the sixth round, where Atlanta took a low-cost swing on the upside. He is the inverse of Delane: same recruiting pedigree, opposite draft outcome, and a reminder that the gap between projection and selection is measured in healthy snaps.

The honest read on LSU's 2026 class is that it was good at the top and unremarkable below it, which is a downgrade from the program's peak. Delane is a legitimate first-round corner and the streak-keeper. Nussmeier is the cautionary tale — a top-of-the-board quarterback whose body betrayed his draft year. And the coaching change that cost Brian Kelly his job hangs over a class that, by LSU standards, underdelivered. The pipeline is not broken. But seven picks, one first-rounder, and a seventh-round quarterback who was supposed to go first is not the LSU the SEC learned to fear.